Process plants for carrying out chemical and/or physical reactions are used in several industrial fields, for example the chemical, pharmaceutical or biological industry. Process plants are either purpose built for a specific reaction or designed as multi-purpose plants. Multi-purpose plants are especially suited for customer specific productions or for industrial fields with fast changing production lines and products. Therefore, multi-purpose plants are often operated discontinuously and either the multi-purpose plant and/or the reaction have to be adapted.
Any chemical and/or physical reaction is usually first developed at laboratory scale and then gradually expanded from laboratory scale to bench scale, to a pilot plant and then to a full-sized process plant. Such a scale-up process can be a quite expensive and also a very time consuming process, especially as certain aspects have to be determined again at each step of the scale up process. These aspects are for example the productivity and selectivity of the reaction, the quality of the product as well as aspects related to the safety and to environmental protection. Nowadays especially safety aspects and aspects concerning the environmental protection get more and more important.
Besides the classic approach of the gradually scale up of a chemical and/or a physical reaction theoretical approaches have been developed. M. Bollyn and others built, for example, a mathematical model based on kinetic reaction parameters, which allows a numerical simulation of the behavior of an industrial reactor or of a process plant. The kinetic reaction parameters have to be determined at laboratory scale with a reaction calorimeter and the quality of the numerical simulation stands and falls with the quality of the determination of the reaction kinetics. The determination of the reaction kinetics is only simple as long as the reaction itself is simple. For reactions with several reaction steps and/or byproducts such a determination can get very complicated and therefore time consuming.
For industries using multi-purpose plants it would be very interesting and helpful to have a simple and fast but nevertheless correct way of predicting the up-scaled behavior of a given reaction at laboratory scale.
It is therefore the aim of this invention to develop a method for simulating the dynamic temperature behavior of at least one part of a process plant at laboratory scale.